


Within These Walls

by MelyndaR



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Additional Tags to Be Added, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2020-01-15 02:54:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18489859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelyndaR/pseuds/MelyndaR
Summary: Robert Crawley could count on one hand the number of people with whom he had been totally honest about who he was – what he was – and... frankly, even as the years wore on, that fact sometimes made it difficult to be as happy with his life as he would've liked. At least he was surrounded in his home by people who understood all of those feelings.





	1. Chapter 1

John Bates wanted to think that he was a good man. He did his best to be a good lover (when he got the chance) and husband (such as his relationship with Vera was), and right now he did his damnedest to daily be the best soldier he could manage. Not an easy feat when he frequently woke up like this, the dirt and smoke of the day mingling with the sweat and tears of his nightmares.

And then there was Robert. Captain Crawley. His superior. Only it was different in moments like this, when the world narrowed down to trenches and night watches, fitful sleep to the background noise of explosions… and two shaking bodies in the darkness.

John was almost ashamed to admit that he expected the appearance of the arm that draped across his middle as much as he did his name being whispered sharply into the air between them. He made a noise that he would never admit was a whimper as he rolled over – into the offered arms of his captain.

“John?” Robert murmured against his ear as he lay down beside him. “You’re awake? You’re here, I’m here, I’ve got you. I’ll keep you safe. We keep each other safe, remember, John?”

John nodded, dashing the tears from his cheeks, half angry at his own traitorous mind when he could feel his own best friend and brother in arms trembling just as he was. But at the same time, he was too overwhelmed and despairing to truly be ashamed of his own willingness to take the comfort that was being offered.

He and Robert both were overwhelmed and terrified and… and a little broken in a couple of different ways.

He drew in a shuddering breath, more than willing as Robert cupped the back of his neck and leaned in for a kiss as they lay together.

“I remember, Robert.”

* * *

Lord Robert Crawley could count on one hand the number of people with whom he had been totally honest about who he was – _what_ he was – and the most recent man among that tally was lying unconscious in a hospital bed. Because of him. Because John had reacted faster than Robert had and taken a damn bullet in the leg for him. John had hit his head going down, and he had yet to wake up, so he had been sent home with an honorable discharge, and Robert had been so wrecked that, thanks to his standing on the social ladder, he’d been allowed to come back with him.

Mrs. Bates hadn’t been in to see her husband since their arrival the previous day, but judging by John’s stories of the woman, Robert couldn’t say he cared. He couldn’t say that John would even care, if he had been awake. In fact, Robert was rather grateful she hadn’t made an appearance. As long as she didn’t, Robert was, in a way, responsible for his batman’s medical decisions for as long as John stayed asleep.

So far that had meant a daily argument with an increasingly weary doctor over whether or not John’s leg needed to be amputated. Robert had already decided that in the end, he _would_ win the argument. He was not a man to allow his people to be harmed where he could help it.

In the end, John woke up to a leg set in the most restrictive setting Robert had ever seen – part of the doctor’s ultimate attempt to allow the shattered bones to heal themselves, crooked, uneven, and stiff, but _still there_ , and they all knew that meant a better quality of life for John. He woke up to Mrs. Bates at his bedside, having arrived only hours before after hearing that her husband had pulled through a surgery. And he woke up to Robert sitting in a chair on the other side of his bed, exhausted from holding a vigil that he didn’t have the stomach for discussing.

With Mrs. Bates there, dutifully playing the part of a worried, passionate wife, Robert had to look away and swallow bile whenever he looked at the two of them, at the picture they made, and at what John had surrendered to the war for his sake. The day Mrs. Bates came, and John woke was the day that Robert felt he had to leave his dearest friend and lover. Mrs. Bates would not leave her husband’s side, even though something dispassionate flickered in her gaze whenever it turned truthful, and so Robert was forced to only shake John’s hand and tell him “good night” and “thank you” in the same way he might’ve to one of his cousins.

He left the room, unable to make himself say “goodbye,” and, telling himself it was better this way, he did not look back on John Bates for years.

But, upon his return home to Downton, he got lucky. Extraordinarily lucky, in fact. Rosamund began to regale him with tales of an American heiress that she had recently met, a young woman she was really _very sure_ Robert would be interested in meeting. No matter how much he begged her to stop, to just let him _rest_ before she and their mother tried to toss him back into the world, she wouldn’t.

When she began to hang Downton over his head, the fact that they _all_ needed him to marry a woman like this to secure their estate, he gave into letting Rosamund introduce him to Cora Levinson. She was, as Rosamund had promised, a very lovely young woman in a number of ways, and far more refined than her parents. And she was fabulously wealthy, which was very helpful to the cause of keeping his home. Though they didn’t quite fall in love, they certainly became good friends, and not a year after meeting her, they were married.

And Robert became happy in his life with Cora and the daughters they soon brought together into the world. _Why shouldn’t he be happy,_ he asked himself. Here with his family, in his ancestral home, he had everything that a man could wish for.  


	2. Chapter 2

In a twist of fate that Robert suspected only Rosamund had seen coming – blast his sister, sometimes she liked drama a little too much – Cora told the whole truth before he could find a way to bring himself to. Even though she confessed it years after Sybil’s birth, she still confessed the truth of herself first. He came into her bedroom, of all places, to tell her goodnight before retiring to his own bed, but when she set aside her book, revealing wide, serious eyes, he instinctively moved to sit down, sensing – by now without her saying a word – that something was on her mind.

She looked a little afraid, he saw suddenly, and instead of sitting in a chair, he sat on the edge of the bed, taking her hand as he asked, “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Cora’s brow furrowed as she replied, “At least… I think so. But I want to talk to you about something… and I want—I want to apologize in advance for it.”

 “I’m sure all will be forgiven,” because he had come to love his wife, as she had him. He didn’t consider himself _completely_ broken in that way, after all, only halfway so, as it were. Robert raised his eyebrows as he added curiously, “As soon as I know what I have forgiven?”

Cora swallowed, stared at their entwined hands for a moment, and then back up at him. “You do love me, don’t you, Robert?”

He blinked, scrambling to think where _that_ sort of question might’ve come from. “Of course I do. Why? What have I done to make you ask such a thing?”

“Nothing!” She hurried to reassure him, only to pause and amend, “Well, not recently, anyway.” Cora shook her head. “But that’s of no consequence now; I don’t exactly want to talk about you, I want to tell you something about me.”

“Very well.” He nodded, urging her to continue. “What’s that?”

“I love you, Robert, and I don’t know how to say what I need to without taking away from that, but _please_ understand that I love you. As the man I married and the father of my children, I adore you, but… I think I love someone as well as you.”

Robert froze, completely baffled, and his first instinct was to pull away from her entirely in shock.

Cora saw the emotions in his face of course, and rushed to try and explain, her hands tight around his so that he couldn’t get away. “I love you as dearly as I ever have, I swear it, so much so that there are parts of myself that I haven’t even felt the need to explore since moving to England to be with you, but—” she stumbled, suddenly very timid, and very _unlike Cora_ as she admitted, “But there is someone who’s… made it past that barrier, _through no fault of their own_ , and it doesn’t even matter because they certainly don’t feel the same way about me, and I don’t know why I’m telling you, but I am. Because I thought that I had put this foolishness behind me, but now I don’t think I have, and I don’t want to lie to my husband about it – about anything, if I can help it.”

“Who is he?” Robert asked frostily, not sure what else to say before he’d had time to consider what she’d said. “And what have… the two of you done?”

“We haven’t done anything!’ Cora assured him. “Honestly.”

“But _who_ is he?”

She suddenly gripped his hand so tightly her knuckles turned white, asking in that same strangely small voice, “Do you still love me?”

Robert looked away from her, trying not to say something he would regret, and a little aghast that she would ask such a question after making such a question. “Does it matter; will this man’s identity change my love?”

Cora swallowed roughly, and she seemed to have to make herself look him in the eyes as she asked, “What if I’ve come to love… a woman?”

He froze, stricken truly dumb this time, as suddenly he was cast back to just _how_ insistent Rosamund had been that he and Cora would make a good match. She had almost always known how he… was bent, and if she had somehow come to know the same thing about Cora…

“Does Rosamund know there is this side of you?” he asked suddenly, not realizing how irrelevant and strange the question must’ve sounded until he noted Cora’s expression.

She nodded, though, admitting, “When I first came to England, as I was just beginning to make friends, I’m afraid she found me in a rather… telling position with a… a farmer’s daughter, of all things. But she was always very kind and quiet about it, and I never pursued those things after you and I began to get to know one another better.”

“I would imagine that Rosamund has stayed ‘kind and quiet’,” Robert murmured quietly, crossing one leg over the other as he moved closer to Cora on the bed, made a horrible split-second decision, and screwed his courage to the sticking place, “Because she has dealt with a brother who feels something for his own kind – and women, mind – for her whole life.”

By God, his sister must’ve meant for them to have this conversation so much sooner than now. But now it was out, and even as he searched Cora’s puzzled face for a real reaction, he felt a weight life off his shoulders at his own honesty with her.

“You… have loved men?” she asked hesitantly.

He nodded.

“Did any of them ever love you in return?”

 _Was that a strange question?_ He wasn’t sure, but he wouldn’t begrudge her if she was trying to understand his own situation. “No, I don’t think so.” Perversely, he wanted to believe that was a lie, but he didn’t dare. “Mostly, I only ever felt… physical attraction toward men when I felt such things at all.”

 

“And yet you say you’ve _loved_?”

Blessed woman, there was no judgement in her eyes, and Robert moved until he was sitting with his back to the headboard, considering staying with her tonight, just to further appreciate having her at his side. “My batman during the war. I cannot say how he felt about me, though. If he did love me, I seemed to be something of a special case for him, and if he didn’t… well, I doubt he did, anyway. He was married, though he didn’t talk about her as if she was someone he was eager to return to, and she appeared to sour towards him once he was wounded.”

“How dreadful for him,” Cora murmured, and Robert was inclined to agree.

“In any case, during war like that… it’s more common than people like to admit – men being with men. Just to have _someone_ when you’re all so afraid and miserable, to feel human again is a marvelous thing no matter what form it comes in. Often it feels more like an extension of survival than any real emotion, and… and I’m sure that’s all it was for him. Survival and physicality.”

“Tell me about him?” Cora requested gently, making him realize just how down in the mouth he’d gotten.

Robert shook his head, made himself grin a bit, as if this conversation wasn’t the most absurd one he’d ever had in a civilized manner. “You first. What is _her_ name?”

Cora’s expression fell into worry again as she admitted, “That’s the trouble. It’s O’Brien.” Robert’s eyebrows flew up as she continued, “And I know she doesn’t feel things that way about women.” He kept the fact that he sometimes wondered if Sarah O’Brien had real feelings at all to himself as Cora finished, “So here I am. Very much in love with my husband, and pining after a woman who won’t care for me as I do her.” She was frowning at first, but she smiled a little, carefully, at him as she admitted, “But, strange as it is, I do think I’m glad I told you. I’m certainly glad you told me.”

“Were you…” he hesitated, not sure he wanted the answer, but by the look on Cora’s face she wanted to know what he was thinking – and this _was_ an incredibly open conversation after all, why stop now? “Terribly surprised by me?”

She paused. “Yes and no. I met you right after the war, and I wondered if you were pining over someone, so I asked Rosamund. She was only able to stress that you hadn’t particularly had a lot of opportunities to be around women and given what she’d seen me do… it left me with questions that I never dared ask you.”

“And yet you married me anyway?”

“Of course I did. You were charming and kind, and if you were… a little different, as I was, then why should I care?”

“So we’ve both spent our entire marriage afraid to tell the other something about which we… don’t really mind?” he summarized, hoping that he wasn’t putting words in her mouth.

Cora nodded, leaning into him as she lay down on the bed properly. “Silly of us, in a way, maybe, but I am terribly glad it’s out between us now.”

“As am I,” he replied honestly, blowing out the last of the candles lighting the room before curling around his wife. He paused, not sure the question was necessary, but speaking it into the darkness anyway: “You don’t mind if I share your room tonight, do you?”

He shared her bed a little more than most married men, he had a feeling, and he’d never been given a reason to believe she liked that fact any less than he did, but if her mind was occupied with another tonight… he was just selfish enough to admit that he would rather not see that in her.

Cora squeezed his arm, kissing him gently. “I will never mind, my dearest – because you are my dearest, always.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, because I feel like this is something that might be useful, here's a list of the sexuality of everyone we're dealing with so far:  
> Robert is bi.  
> Cora is pansexual.  
> John Bates is demisexual.  
> O'Brien is hetero - or very possibly ace, but I don't foresee it coming up in this story.


	3. Chapter 3

The new footman, Thomas Barrow, had been at the abbey for about a week, and as far as housemaid Anna Smith knew, he’d managed to say no more than five words apiece to any given member of the household. She didn’t like it, didn’t like the dark air of sadness that hung about his head. It didn’t seem right for someone as young as he was, but so far, her gentle attempts to get him to open up, even most of her attempts to simply be friendly, had been met with mere civility. No real softening of his stony demeanor seemed to be anywhere in sight, and she had no idea what to do about it.

That made it even more of a shock when Anna, on one of the very few times she was allowed by Mrs. Hughes to be in the men’s section of the servants’ quarters, opened his bedroom door to see Thomas shirtless. Gasping, she quickly shut the door, only taking stock of _precisely_ what she had seen after she’d done so. She should’ve been able to be glad that his back had been to her, at least, but she wasn’t, because as she pictured what she had only glimpsed, she realized that his back had been crisscrossed with scabs and scars.

Someone had taken a belt to him.

Anna’s jaw clenched, her hands tightening around the pile of clean laundry she was holding. _How awful_.

She crouched to leave Thomas’ clothes on the floor for him to pick up when he came out of his room, only for his bedroom door to be wrenched open. Thomas stared down at her, pale except for a spot of bright color on each cheek, with a hastily thrown-on shirt in place now.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

Anna hurriedly stood, passing his clothing to him with as carefully neutral an expression as she could manage. “Returning your laundered clothes.”

“I didn’t think that was a housemaid’s job,” he said, eyeing her suspiciously, but he took his things anyway.

“It’s not; I was only doing a favor for the laundry woman, Mrs. Tate.”

“How kind of you,” he said sharply, clearly meaning the opposite.

“What are you doing up here?” Anna asked, not entirely willing to be intimidated. “In your room in the middle of the workday?”

Thomas didn’t miss the slight accusation, though Anna didn’t put any real heart behind it. His eyes flashed, with anger or panic, she wasn’t sure which, before he answered, “Changing my shirt. The other got a spot on it, is all. I’ll be right back down, if you must know.”

“Your shirt?” she questioned suspiciously. “Not your shirt _front_? Underneath a suit and a shirtfront, and your _shirt_ is what’s soiled?” She had been about to ask him _How? Had it gotten dirty from the inside out?_ But she realized that, yes, it might’ve. If he was bleeding from whatever wounds he had that were still healing. “Oh,” she said softly, and then she asked cautiously, like she was approaching her sister after one of their step-father’s fits of temper, “Do you have something to put on it – an ointment of some kind?”

He blinked at her, momentarily thrown off if she didn’t miss her mark, but then he ground his jaw when he understood what she meant, answering archly, “Well, that would likely require telling someone why I needed it, wouldn’t it?”

“Surely, though, you need—”

As suddenly as he had opened his bedroom door, he shut it in her face. Anna huffed quietly before turning on her heel and heading back the way she had come. Troubling as this discovery was, she still had work to do, and, if nothing else, she could think it all over as she dusted the library.

* * *

The one thing that most everyone did already know about Thomas Barrow was where he was likely to be found during a moment of downtime: loitering somewhere between the servants’ entrance and the stable yard with a cigarette. Cigarettes, it appeared, were the way to make friends with him – or at least that’s what O’Brien had discovered.

Nora, the housemaid who shared a room with Anna, had said that she’d seen O’Brien lend Thomas a fistful of cigarettes upon his promise to repay her when he got his first cheque. This meant that, lucky for Anna, he occasionally went out and smoked alone.

The day after she’d seen him in his room, Anna kept an eye on him after dinner, and waited until she saw him go out for an evening smoke to run up to her room. From her suitcase atop her and Nora’s wardrobe, the case being where she traditionally kept her few personal things, she retrieved a tin of healing ointment and then ran all the way back downstairs with it, slowing down as she walked through the hall and outside to stand beside Thomas.

Thomas glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, sighing out a stream of smoke as he asked, “What do you want?”

Anna stepped even closer to him until their shoulders were practically touching, and covertly pressed her tin into his free hand where it dangled at his side. “Ointment. To help your healing,” she murmured for only the two of them to hear, staring up at the stars as if they, and not her desire to help, were the reason she had come outside.

She was close enough to him that she caught the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, his eyes flashing with soon-concealed confusion as he glanced at her, then up at the stars like she was. He slipped the tin into his pocket, then held up something he’d grabbed from the same pocket. “Want one?”

She shook her head at the cigarette, then turned to go back inside. “Good night, Thomas.”

“Good night.”

* * *

When Thomas went out for his smoke the following evening, Anna once again waited a few minutes before she followed him into the otherwise silent stable yard. He seemed far less surprised to see her this time than he had the night before, giving her another side-eye – this one only half so hard, she noticed – as he asked, “Change your mind about that smoke, did you?”

“No.” Anna came to stand a little uneasily beside him, not buoyed with such a purpose as she had been the night before.

“Do you want your… stuff back, then?”

 _Did he mean the ointment?_ “No. I hope I won’t have any further need of it.”

“Then what do you want, then?” he asked with an annoyed edge to his voice.

“To talk, maybe,” Anna admitted, even though she wasn’t really sure of even that. “I’m new here too, you know.”

“Not as new as me.”

“I only proceeded you by a week.”

He lapsed into the brooding silence that seemed to be his constant companion for a minute, before he asked acerbically, “If you want to talk: what did you need the… tin for in the first place?”

Anna hesitated, watching him out of the corner of her eye as he did the same to her. He arched one eyebrow, waiting wordlessly, and they both knew that if she didn’t answer, he was more comfortable with the silence than she was. _Well, she could always tell him_ enough _of the truth to satisfy him, couldn’t she? If she wanted to give him a friend and earn his trust, didn’t’ that have to be a two-way street, as well as it could be?_ “My stepfather,” she began vaguely. “Caught me doing something he didn’t… approve of. He’s a mean man with a mean – often drunken – temper, and… that was… one of the last straws in our already difficult relationship. He…” she swallowed roughly, lowering her voice to say only, “Punished me as he saw fit, and… I left home not long after, thanks to my mum. She helped me find this job so I could get away from him before the situation got worse.”

Thomas Barrow cut directly through her delicate handling of the situation to ask with pale cheeks and eyes that were narrowed fully upon her face now, “You’re saying your stepfather… beat you?”

Anna nodded, hearing her own heartbeat thud in her ears for the few silent moments that followed before Thomas turned his gaze back to the stars and said, “I am truly sorry to hear that. And I’m glad you got away.” There was an underlying ferocity in his tone that spoke to just how much he meant that, and he cleared his throat in a bid to be rid of it.

Anna wondered for a moment if she dared turn the question on him, but, then again, what did she really have to lose at this point? “What about you?” she asked softly. “What happened that you need the tin I gave you?”

Thomas’s jaw clenched, a twitch of pallid skin in the darkness that surrounded them, and he asked only “Are you sure about that cigarette” while completely ignoring her question.

Anna nodded, hoping that if she stayed silent, he might give her a proper answer to her question. Instead, Thomas nodded too, and stepped back inside the house without another word. Anna looked back up at the stars, said a silent prayer that her mother and sister were safe with her stepfather, and followed him in.

* * *

The third night, Anna heard Thomas sigh before her footsteps even stopped beside him. “Are you going to keep following me out here until I give you an answer, because I’ll start smoking in my room and chance lighting us all on fire, if that’s the case.”

“No, you won’t,” Anna returned levelly. “Mr. Carson will sack you if he so much as catches a whiff of your smoke in the house, and then where will you go? You are now as stuck here as I am, aren’t you?” Because it seemed clear to her that he was, in effect, running from unpleasantness as much as she was.

“Difference being,” he pointed out. “That you fit in here; you’re making friends, and you look a lot less stuck than I feel.”

“You could make friends, too, you know.”

To that, he said nothing, only sighed a second time and held a fresh cigarette out to her. It occurred to her that he kept offering them in hopes that having it might make her talk less while they were out here together, but she kept that thought to herself, and steered the conversation back in the direction he’d began it in. Gently, she asked, “What happened to you, Thomas? Can I help you somehow?”

He shook his head. “No, no one can help me. I promise you that.”

“Maybe you should talk about it anyway. I know it seems strange to say, but I’ve been told talking helps you get over things.”

“Who told you that?” he asked with a snort.

“My mum,” Anna admitted, a wry smile tipping up one side of her mouth.

“And are you very good at it – talking about your stepfather and the things that pain you?”

“…No,” Anna allowed. “Not really. But I’ll talk to you if you’ll talk to me.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re both new here, like I said before, and we both need a friend. And,” she hesitated. “It would be nice to have a friend who understands… some of my fears.”

“Yes,” Thomas agreed, looking at the night sky instead of at her once again. “But if I tell you why my father took the belt to me the way he did, you’d agree with _him_.”

Anna turned quickly to him, asking sharply, “Now, what makes you say that?!”

“I don’t mean it as an insult,” Thomas said, kicking at the gravel underneath his shoes. “It’s just because you seem to be a decent person, is all.”

“And you’re not?” Anna asked in confusion.

Thomas shook his head. “Not in the traditional sense, no. Not,” he glanced over at her suddenly, and the raw desire for understanding that Anna saw in his eyes caught her off-guard. “That I would hurt you. I’m… a private person, not a dangerous one. I’m just not… normal, not like my father would have me be.”

“Being ‘not normal’ is no excuse whatsoever for someone to beat you, though.”

He smiled lopsidedly at her, though ghosts still danced in his eyes. “Thanks.”

* * *

While she’d been working throughout the following day, Anna had also been thinking, trying to figure out any explanation except for the one that immediately came to mind that made sense of the conversation she’d had with Thomas the previous night. Surely there _were_ other explanations, but she couldn’t think of them. Still, by the time she followed him outside a fourth time, she had _almost_ convinced herself the explanation couldn’t be what she thought it was.

But… _was there a way to ask without giving away her own… standing on the matter?_

“What is it now?” he asked her by way of greeting, giving her a wary smirk that could’ve _almost_ been friendly, but wasn’t quite there yet. Which only emphasized why she shouldn’t ask what she wanted to. Anna asked anyway. Thomas gave her the perfect opening to when he remarked offhandedly, “People are going to begin to talk, you know, you and I spending all of this time alone under the cover of darkness.”

Anna blinked at him, almost thought better of going down this road, and then charged ahead anyway, asking levelly, “Do I have anything to worry about from you, though?”

It was Thomas’s turn to look confused, though he quickly smoothed the gesture back to his usual indifferent expression as he asked, “What?”

She swallowed, then tried again, lowering her voice and pitching it so that only he would hear no matter if anyone happened to be around. “Are you interested in women, Thomas? Or… is that why your father treated you the way he did, why you think I’ll turn against you if I find out the truth? Because you’re interested in your own kind too?”

“Why would you think that?” he asked, turning to her with shock and confusion and something _else_ that Anna couldn’t put her finger on scrolled across his features. “What have I ever done here to make anyone think I’m… _that_ way?!”

“It’s nothing,” Anna hurried to assure him. “Nothing at all, really. It’s just—nothing else made sense to me when I tried to piece together what you said last night.”

“Well then, maybe you shouldn’t try so hard to piece other people’s lives together,” he snapped, not even bothering to finish his cigarette before he crushed it out and left her alone in the darkness

Anna closed her eyes, leaning against the wooden beam at her back and swallowing past the lump in her throat, trying to smooth out the emotions she was sure were on her face before she went back indoors. The image of her stepfather loomed behind her eyelids, though, sneering down at her with hatred and disgust on his face as his belt cracked through the air and onto her. Her back, her neck, her legs and arms, he hadn’t cared where the lashes landed, so long as they hurt her. After she’d nearly stabbed him when he’d come into her bedroom – one of his _other_ ideas of how to “fix” the way he’d seen her looking at a friend of hers – he’d left her alone for a few weeks, until he’d caught Anna and that same girl, Marybeth Lewis, kissing in the wheat fields at the edge of their farm. Marybeth had run when Anna’s stepfather appeared, and, left alone with her, he had resorted to his most-used tactic for controlling her – violence. At the time, she had been grateful, in a twisted way, that he had only turned to something that she had learned how to grow numb to.

Now, as her eyes snapped open and she focused on evening out her breathing, Anna was just grateful to be gone from underneath his reign of terror over her. _As long as she hadn’t raised Thomas’s suspicions in a way that would harm her thus-far untainted reputation here…_

**Author's Note:**

> So, I have multiple ideas for, basically, a loosely connected series of chapters from the same 'verse featuring a nearly all-bisexual cast of Downton characters. There should be some more Robert/John alongside Thomas and Anna friendship, Anna/Mary, Sybil/Gwen, Thomas/Matthew, and Cora/O'Brien and/or Cora/Baxter, alongside some marriage of convenience and polyamory subplots. If any of that sounds like something you'd be interested in, or if you just liked this little piece of writing, please let me know!


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